Sawyer wins Hal Clement Award

Robert J. Sawyer's nineteenth novel,
WWW: Watch,
won the Hal Clement Award for Best Young-Adult Science
Fiction Novel of 2010; the award was be presented at the 2011
World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada, on August 19, 2011.

The Hal Clement Award  one of the Golden Duck Awards
honoring excellence in children's science-fiction  has
been given annually since 1992.

Runners-up for the 2011 Hal Clement Award were:

Cassini Code by Dom Tesla (Tor Teen)

Crashed by Robin Wasserman (Simon Pulse)

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse)

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi (Little Brown)

Virals by Kathy Reichs (Razorbill)

Vulture's Wake by Kirsty Murray (Holiday House)

Hal Clement was one of the greatest
hard-SF writers of all time. He was named a Grand Master by the
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and was the
author of such classics as Mission of Gravity and
Needle. He passed away in 2003.

In addition to winning the Hal Clement Award, Watch was
also a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association's Fiction
Award for Best Novel of the Year and the Audio Publishers
Association's Audie Award for Best SF&F Audiobook of the Year.
The novel won the Aurora Award for Best English Novel, Canada's
top honour in science fiction.

Watch,
the middle volume of Sawyer's WWW trilogy, tells the story
of sixteen-year-old blind Waterloo, Ontario, math genius Caitlin
Decter's attempts to protect Webmind, a nascent consciousness
lurking in the background of the Internet, from efforts to
destroy it by the US National Security Agency.